The present invention relates in general to an apparatus for preserving and dispensing wine or champagne. One or more wine or champagne bottles may be stored in the apparatus for preservation and future use by a wine or champagne consumer.
Millions of people throughout the world drink wine and champagne. Numerous types of wine and champagne are produced in many countries throughout the world. Most wine and champagne are distributed to consumers in bottles. Wine and champagne bottles are usually sealed with a cork to prevent exposure to the air and to preserve the wine or champagne. Consumers of wine or champagne may drink an entire bottle, a significant portion of a bottle or only one glass of wine or champagne. Some consumers may drink a glass of wine a day while others may only drink one glass a week. When a bottle of wine or champagne is opened, the seal formed between the bottle and the cork is broken, air enters the bottle and the quality of the wine or champagne remaining in the bottle begins to degrade due to oxidation.
Wine begins to oxidize when it comes in contact with air and more specifically, with the oxygen present in the air. For a short period of time, oxygen and the process of oxidation benefit wine. With many types of wine, it is recommended to let the wine “breathe” before drinking. Breathing or exposing wine to ambient air for a short time allows a small amount of oxidation to induce the release of certain volatile compounds in the wine, which wine drinkers find to have a desirous effect on the wine's taste. Continued oxidation, however, eventually degrades every type of wine. To slow the degradation of the wine, a majority of wine is stored and preserved in bottles that are sealed with a cork or similar sealing device. However, uncorking or opening a wine bottle generally initiates the beginning of the end of a wine's useful or tasteful life. Red wines often degrade faster than white wines. Sweeter white wines tend to last longer, or degrade slower, than other white wines. Once the bottles are opened, most wines last less than a day even if the cork is properly replaced or the wine bottle is closed in a suitable period of time. In fact, the taste of some wines such as pinot noir, begins to degrade within thirty minutes after opening the bottle. This is problematic because, as indicated above, often times people do not finish a bottle of wine or champagne on the day the bottle is opened. Accordingly, wine and champagne are often wasted because people only consume portions of the wine or the champagne in a bottle and the remaining portions in the bottle lose their taste.
Attempts to reduce the oxidation and degradation of wine and thus to preserve wine have involved either limiting or eliminating the presence of oxygen to exposed wine surfaces. Since air includes approximately twenty-one percent oxygen, the attempts to preserve wine have involved either limiting or eliminating the presence of air to exposed wine surfaces. Simple procedures such as tightly replacing the cork and reducing the amount of air space or head space above the liquid level of the wine in the bottle are marginally effective at limiting the wine's degradation.
The problem with these simple procedures is practicality. Since wine is acidic and has a low pH, wine attracts oxygen from the open air. The extra hydrogen molecules of the wine seek electrons from the oxygen in the air. Longer exposures of wine to the open air increase the ionic balancing that takes place. Consequently, when a person forgets to immediately replace a cork after filling one or more glasses of wine, the degradation progresses and increases.
Other more complicated solutions for wine preservation are also known. The Vacu-Vin® Vacuum Wine Saver System manufactured by Vacu-Products B.V. Corporation is a device that manually evacuates the air from the head space inside a wine bottle to slow the degradation of the wine and to extend the preservation of the wine after the wine bottle is opened. This device includes a rubberized stopper that fits within the neck of a wine bottle similar to a cork. The stopper forms a seal in the neck of the bottle to prevent air from entering the bottle and remains in the bottle until the bottle is empty or discarded. A separate mechanical hand-held vacuum pump is attached to the top of the stopper and draws the air from the head space inside the bottle through the stopper and out of the vacuum pump attachment. A user pulls on a handle on the vacuum pump to draw the air out of the bottle. The user continues to draw the air out of the bottle by pulling on the handle of the vacuum pump attachment until a vacuum is created inside the wine bottle. Other known wine bottle vacuum devices combine the vacuum pumps with a dispenser, which enables the wine drinker or server to leave the stopper in place until the bottle is completed. If the stoppers do not have a dispenser, then the stoppers have to be removed and replaced in the same manner as a cork. Even with the stopper, the person must remember to intermittently evacuate the head space.
Head space evacuation also has a number of inherent problems. First and foremost, an evacuated head space has a sub-atmospheric pressure that works against whatever sealing device the stopper provides in an attempt to draw in oxygen laden air. In contrast, some nitrogen systems (described below) operate at a slightly elevated pressure inside the head space. These systems also work against the sealing device, but maintain a substantially inert atmosphere even if depressurized to atmospheric pressure.
Evacuating the head space is also a manually operated, mechanical and imprecise procedure. More head space requires more pumping, and people attempting to judge whether they have pumped enough are likely to pump too little, leaving air in the bottle, or pump too much, and unduly stress the stopper and the pumping mechanism. In short, known head space pumps do not consistently and reliably eliminate oxygen, do not provide positive pressure systems, require a separate pump or stopper for each open bottle, and require undesired manual operation by the wine drinker or server. Thus, trying to replace the head space in a bottle of wine is logistically difficult. People enjoying a glass of wine typically do not want to contend with such detailed or specific procedures.
Other known wine preservation and dispensing devices use an inert gas to blanket the head space in a wine bottle. These systems use an inert gas such as nitrogen from a large gas storage cylinder or smaller portable containers. Several types of such nitrogen preservation systems are known. Some systems preserve only one wine bottle and others preserve a plurality of wine bottles. Examples of such systems are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,477,477; 4,595,121; 4,691,842; and 5,139,179.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,477,477 discloses an inert gas such as nitrogen dispensed into a wine bottle from a gas storage container such as a gas cylinder or gas cartridge. The inert gas travels through a tube and into the wine bottle. A sealing member is positioned around the tube and fits into the neck of the bottle to seal the bottle opening. The sealing member allows air to pass out of the bottle and the inert gas to be supplied to the bottle. The inert gas replaces the air, which would otherwise exist in the head space. Once the inert gas fills the head space of the wine bottle and a significant amount of the air inside the bottle is displaced, the sealing member and tube are removed from the bottle and the cork is replaced. This manual process is repeated each time the user desires to preserve the wine in the bottle after the bottle has been opened.
Similarly, U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,595,121 and 4,691,842 disclose devices for dispensing and preserving degradable liquids such as wine. These devices include a cap or stopper having a gas supply tube and a wine dispensing tube which is inserted into the opening of a wine bottle. The cap seals the opening of the bottle. A storage cylinder containing a non-degrading gas delivers the gas to the cap and into the wine bottle. The gas displaces the air inside the bottle. In U.S. Pat. No. 4,595,121, the cap or stopper disconnects from the gas supply tube and wine dispensing tube and remains in the wine bottle opening so that the user can store and preserve the wine for later use. In U.S. Pat. No. 4,691,842, the plug remains in the wine bottle until the bottle is empty.
Other known preservation systems employ a portable gas container which can be transported by a user and attached to an opened wine bottle at remote locations. One such device is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,139,179. In this device, a stopper is inserted into an open wine bottle to seal the bottle opening from the air. A small gas cartridge containing an inert gas such as nitrogen or carbon dioxide is then attached to the top of the stopper. When the cartridge engages the stopper, the cartridge releases the inert gas into the wine bottle. The inert gas displaces the air inside the bottle and promotes the preservation of the wine as well as the dispensing of the wine from the bottle. The gas cartridge is then disconnected from the stopper. The stopper remains in the wine bottle opening for storage and future use if desired. Other known wine preservation devices use a small portable gas canister or gas cylinder bottle to supply an inert gas to a wine bottle.
All of the above devices use a gas container such as a gas cylinder to supply the inert gas to a wine bottle. These devices have certain potential problems. The systems that utilize large gas cylinders provide a plentiful supply of inert gas; however, the cylinders are large and, therefore, hard to obtain, store or transport. A large gas cylinder is unattractive and too bulky to store in a kitchen or other convenient location in a home. The small portable gas canisters and cartridges are small enough to store under a sink or cabinet. However, these systems are limited because a canister or cartridge may only be used a limited number of times before running out of inert gas. Therefore, a user must store or transport several canisters or cartridges when using this type of system. Also, the canisters and cartridges must be replaced, which can be time consuming and expensive.
Nitrogen is preferably used in the wine preservation devices described above because nitrogen is an inert, non-flammable gas that is normally extracted from air in the atmosphere of the earth, which is approximately seventy-eight percent nitrogen. Other inert gases, such as argon could be used in place of nitrogen. Argon, in particular, is understood to be one of the best blanketing gases because it is a heavy gas (approximately 1.4 times heavier than nitrogen) and tends to pool over a target area. Argon, however, makes up less than one percent of air and is therefore generally too limited and expensive to be used for such purposes.
Wine consumers can also purchase pressurized aerosol canisters of nitrogen, which are supplied with long thin straw-like injectors. One such system is the “Private Preserve®” wine saver system. The injectors enable the person to inject an amount of nitrogen into the wine bottle to flush the air out of the bottle. This system suffers in a number of respects. First, the system is inexact in that the wine drinker has no way of knowing how much air is left in the bottle. Similar to the head space pumps, people are likely to inject too little nitrogen and create a less than optimal atmosphere or inject too much nitrogen and waste nitrogen. This system also requires the user to quickly replace a cork or stopper after filling the bottle or risk losing the nitrogen to the atmosphere. Because oxygen is heavier than nitrogen in ambient air, the air tends to settle into a non-covered head space. The process of removing a cork even for a short period of time likely causes air to enter the head space.
Unlike other nitrogen systems, the canister does not provide a positively pressurized head space for the wine bottle. The canister itself is limited in how much pressure it can hold and, more importantly, there is a pressure drop across the straw-like injectors so that the nitrogen exits the injector at the pressure inside the head space, which is atmospheric pressure. In short, existing nitrogen canisters do not have the ability to build pressure.
In a pressurized system, a gas such as nitrogen is supplied to a sealed wine bottle. As gas is supplied to the wine bottle, the pressure within the bottle increases. The pressure increases because the interior chamber space or volume of the wine bottle is fixed, yet more and more gas is being squeezed into that fixed space. To maintain an equilibrium or equal level of pressure with the ambient or outside pressure, the gas pressure inside the wine bottle will seek to equalize with the outside pressure. Thus, the force of the pressure within the wine bottle presses against the interior chamber walls of the wine bottle and the stopper to attempt to equalize with the lower outside pressure. The gas inside the wine bottle will therefore push through leaks or small openings around the stopper. Because the pressure inside the wine bottle is higher than the outside pressure, the outside air will not be able to push or move into the wine bottle through the same leaks or openings.
In a non-pressurized system, the pressure inside the wine bottle is equal to the outside pressure. Therefore, outside air can travel into the head space of the wine bottle as nitrogen travels out of it. Since there is no pressurization however, there is less gas flowing through the leaks. Also, due to the higher pressure inside the bottle, the pressurized systems enable wine to be dispensed without uncorking the bottle by forcing the wine up through a tube inserted into the wine bottle. Non-pressurized systems do not have this ability.
Known nitrogen systems that pressurize the head space of a wine bottle for wine preservation such as the ones described above, include a pressurized or bottled source of nitrogen. The pressurized canisters or cylinders of nitrogen present certain issues for manufacturers and users. Each cylinder or canister must have the proper wall thickness and be welded together or formed according to industry regulation. These systems also have fittings, tubing and gas flow components that are rated based on the operating pressure of the system. Nitrogen systems operating at higher pressures require more robust materials and components and are accordingly more expensive. Systems operating at lower pressures require more frequent refilling.
When the pressurized canisters or cylinders of the known nitrogen systems depressurize completely and thereby run out of nitrogen, the systems can no longer preserve wine until the person refills the canister or cylinder. The canisters or cylinders are refilled in two ways. The wine drinker typically discards a low pressure canister and replaces it with a new pressurized canister. These low pressure gas canisters are relatively expensive. Otherwise, with a high pressure system, the person must take the high pressure canister or cylinder to a cylinder filling shop for a refill. Cylinder filling shops are not always readily accessible and transporting high pressure cylinders creates the possibility that a cap or valve may come loose.
As indicated above, champagne is also a widely consumed beverage that is enjoyed all over the world for its taste and bubbly characteristic. Many types and brands of champagne exist in the market today. The above known preservation and dispensing devices may also be used to preserve and dispense champagne. Similar to wine, the champagne taste and consistency immediately begins to degrade after a bottle is opened. The oxidation of the champagne diminishes the taste of the champagne. Also, the exposure to the lower pressure in the atmosphere enables the bubbles in the champagne to escape. As the bubbles escape, the bubbly quality of the champagne decreases until there are no bubbles left in the champagne.
Accordingly, a need exists for a reliable, safe and efficient wine and champagne preservation and dispensing apparatus that uses an inert gas such as nitrogen, which is able to consistently and reliably pressurize the head space of a wine or champagne bottle. A need also exists for a wine or champagne preservation and dispensing apparatus that does not require canisters or cylinders that must be intermittently swapped out or refilled.